Access to resources, whether via Internet or Intranet, on-premise or in-the-cloud, can depend on authentication and authorization of users. An identity management system (IDM) can provide authentication and authorization services for access to resources. Some IDM systems can implement an identity repository that provides a directory infrastructure for implementing identity management.
Some repositories in an IDM system can support a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) interface for communication. LDAP is growing in importance as more businesses adopt customer-facing applications, mobile computing and cloud computing-based solutions. This growth is leading to an increase in the number of objects that are managed in LDAP-based systems.
REST is a software architectural style that relies on a stateless, client-server, cacheable communications protocol, such as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). A REST-based interface can adhere to the constraints of REST. While REST is increasingly becoming popular, some enterprise systems cannot support a REST-based protocol. Existing IDM systems can be defined using LDAP to support the demands of business applications and customer solutions. An LDAP-based interface is not able to support REST-based protocols.